What Will Our Future Be?

What will our future look like? Don’t scurry around looking for the opinions of experts. Our experts have failed us. You’re the expert now, what do you think?

More than that, what do you feel? What do you want? What do you want our future to be?

When someone asks you what the future will look like, you might get images of Mad Max or The Matrix, but those images have been implanted into the fear receptors in your brain. Even if you have thought those ideas on your own, you have never desired them to come to be.

What do you want the future to look like? For all of us, for humanity and for all the animals that are trapped on this planet with us? What do you want for your children and their children? What do you want people in the future to think of us?

You know how this works on a personal level. Everyone knows that if you eat right, if you brush and floss regularly, exercise, save money and work hard, your future will be much more pleasant than if you do not take care of yourself or plan.

But you are part of an ecosystem. Just as a healthy plant cannot thrive in an unhealthy environment, neither can you thrive in a poisoned ecosystem no matter how you tend to your own health. You will never truly be happy or healthy so long as you neglect the environment in which you live. How healthy will our future environment be?

You’re writing the script even as you read this. Your smallest decisions are determining the future that is coming. It is impossible to know whether your largest efforts will bear fruit, it is true. But it is also impossible to know that your smallest choices will not bear fruit you never would have believed possible. As with the choices you make for your personal wellbeing, it is the day-in, day-out routines you establish which will block by block build the future you desire.

It's easy to feel helpless. We’ve been trained to feel helpless, trained by those who feel helpless inside and try to feel powerful by making others feel miserable.

You can feel helpless if that is what you want, but feeling helpless feels horrible. It’s better to feel helpful, powerful, meaningful.

That’s a choice. It’s a habit. It’s an attitude. You just decide you’re going to look for ways to make the future like how you want it to be. You just find ways that you’re making the world worse and find alternatives. You find one tiny little thing that you were doing before, and decide you don’t have to do it. Think of one small bit of your own power you were giving to soulless institutions or bullies that insisted you had to do things the way they told you, and take it back.

Do it. Find some tiny scrap of change you can make, and then ask yourself if feeling powerful doesn’t feel better than feeling helpless. Embrace the glorious feeling of being able to do something that is good for the universe, and all of the sudden new ideas will occur to you. And each time you embrace such an idea it will make you feel good in a way you had long stopped believing was possible. Feel your power and you will soon realize that those who took it from you or told you you couldn’t have it weren’t your friends. Feel your power and you realize you will never let them take it from you again. There is nothing they can threaten you with, because they cannot threaten you with anything worse than that feeling of helplessness that had been eating away at your gut.

The future is in your hands. What will it look like?

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